Last week, the New Yorker's Instagram account brought beautiful memories of India in the 1850's back to life with some stunning black and white photographs captured of the ordinary people in the era with the help of a Mumbai-based photographer and curator Anusha Yadav. Yadav had started an online project (titled Indian Memory Project) in 2010 to present Indian history through archived content in the form of photographs and letters.

“The basic idea was that if you put several pictures together, you can trace the history of a country, or of the world,” said Yadav in an interview with Quartz. “In my case, I just chose to trace the history of the country through personal stories and photographs.”